DPS data collection efforts falling short

Express-News Editorial Board

Published
4:54 pm CDT, Thursday, November 1, 2018

Evon Bueno, 38, joins a protest against the presence of Texas Department of Public Safety troopers and U.S. Border Patrol agents in the Southmost neighborhood of Brownsville on May 25. The department’s arrest and other statistics remain suspect.

Evon Bueno, 38, joins a protest against the presence of Texas Department of Public Safety troopers and U.S. Border Patrol agents in the Southmost neighborhood of Brownsville on May 25. The department’s arrest

Evon Bueno, 38, joins a protest against the presence of Texas Department of Public Safety troopers and U.S. Border Patrol agents in the Southmost neighborhood of Brownsville on May 25. The department’s arrest and other statistics remain suspect.

Evon Bueno, 38, joins a protest against the presence of Texas Department of Public Safety troopers and U.S. Border Patrol agents in the Southmost neighborhood of Brownsville on May 25. The department’s arrest

The Texas Department of Public Safety owes taxpayers more transparency on the spending of an unprecedented $1.4 billion on border security over the past four years.

A recently released review of the state’s largest law enforcement agency by the Sunset Advisory Commission found the department’s data collection and analysis of border security impacts are lacking.

It is recommending that DPS improve its reporting on its work along the border to allow legislators who have control over the agency’s purse strings to determine the return on the state’s investment to secure the Texas border.

The Legislature has made border security a top priority. It appropriated $749.8 million during the 2015 session and another $694.3 million in the 2017 session. Securing the border continues to be a topic of heated debate across the country and in Texas. There is little reason to believe there will be any cutback in the state allocations despite a pushback from some taxpayers who believe the federal, not the state, government should bear the financial burden for U.S. borders.

While the Sunset Commission does not question the quality of the DPS efforts along the border, it is concerned about “how DPS measures and reports to the Legislature and the public its border security performance to assess the state’s return on its investment.”

Among the issues is the definition of “the border.” There are 14 counties along the Texas-Mexico border. Some state agencies use a 32-county area to define the border and some define it as a 49-county region, while the U.S. Border Patrol uses an informal 100-mile zone along the international boundary line as its primary border region.

In 2017, the Legislature defined the border as a 30-county region along or just beyond the border and the Texas coast, but the DPS is allowed to have its own unique definition of “the border.”

An analysis by the Austin American-Statesman of the nearly 40,000 “border” arrests reported by DPS found that nearly 30 percent occurred more than 100 miles from the border. The newspaper investigation found some of the arrests took place in the Hill County, West Texas and the Panhandle, hardly fitting the definition of being international border regions by any stretch of the imagination.

It is not the first time the fuzzy math of the state’s lead agency for border security has come under scrutiny.

The Austin newspaper reported in 2015 that the state agency inflated the value of the illicit drug seizures by using the retail price of the drugs instead of wholesale values as it had in the past. Thus DPS was able report to Texas lawmakers it had made $1.8 billion in seizures, which was 10 times higher under the new math.

Another Statesman investigation that same year revealed DPS was using drug seizures made by federal agents in its statistics and was actually responsible for less than 10 percent of them.

In 2016, the Associated Press found drunken drivers, parents who were not paying child support and low-level drug offenses were included in thousands of “high-threat” criminal arrests the DPS claimed in its border security statistics.

The disingenuous use of data undermines the work of the agency and raises serious questions about the veracity of the public information it releases on its website and submits to the Texas Legislature. It has all the earmarks of trying to justify with faulty data a suspect use of resources.

In defense of its data reporting, DPS officials note that some of the statistics include arrests made along routes used to smuggle drugs and people beyond the border region.

DPS needs to clean up its act and give taxpayers and lawmakers a better accounting of its work along the border. Otherwise, the suspicion that these skewed statistics are being used for fearmongering will be deemed credible.